A group of southern California students have faced public criticism for playing a Facebook game called “Beat the Jew.”
The game was reportedly shut down after La Quinta High faculty discovered that forty students had played the game.
In the game, a person, titled “the Jew,” is blindfolded and brought to Highway 111 in La Quinta, California. The other team, “the Nazis,” enters automobiles and is tasked with tacking and capturing “the Jew.”
“I cannot understand why they would have this kind of insensitivity, it's beyond my understanding, I'm profoundly disappointed,” La Quinta High School Principal Donna Salazar told KNBC-2.
Desert Sands Unified School District Superintendent Sharon McGehee has said that the students involved in the game have apologized, though they could not be disciplined because they played they game after school off of school property.
Salazar added that the student who reported the game has left the school, fearing retaliations from his or her fellow students.
While Salazar said her students are well educated about the Holocaust, their education clearly had a void. Learning just about the atrocities committed against Jews, and others, is not sufficient to avoid such insensitive actions. More must be done.
